Resilience
Disaster Recovery for First-Time Data Centre Buyers
7 min read
A practical disaster recovery plan defines critical systems, recovery targets, secondary infrastructure, data replication and tested failover procedures.
Disaster recovery is more than backup
Backups protect copies of data, while disaster recovery describes how systems and services are restored after a major disruption. A business may have excellent backups but still face days of downtime if replacement servers, network access, credentials and recovery procedures are unavailable. A data centre can host a secondary environment, but the facility alone does not create a recovery capability. The organisation must define what will run, where it will run, how data reaches it and who has authority to activate the plan.
Set recovery objectives
Two common measures are recovery time objective and recovery point objective. Recovery time objective, or RTO, is the target time to restore a service. Recovery point objective, or RPO, is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. A four-hour RTO and 15-minute RPO require a different design from a two-day RTO and 24-hour RPO. Set objectives for each application based on business impact rather than applying one expensive standard to every system. Confirm dependencies such as identity, DNS, networking and third-party services.
Choose a secondary location carefully
A recovery site should not share the same major risks as the primary location. Consider electricity grids, flood zones, bushfire exposure, telecommunications routes, transport access and the availability of staff. Distance improves geographic separation but may increase latency and make synchronous replication difficult. Some businesses use a second colocation facility, while others recover into public cloud. Providers such as NEXTDC and Equinix operate multiple facilities, but customers must confirm that selected sites have genuinely separate infrastructure and network paths.
Replication, backup and security
Data can be replicated continuously, periodically or restored from backup. Continuous replication supports low RPOs but can copy corruption or ransomware, so immutable backups remain important. Recovery networks, firewall policies, certificates, secrets and access controls must be prepared in advance. Encrypt data in transit and at rest according to risk and regulatory requirements. Capacity should also be reserved: a recovery plan that assumes spare racks, cloud quotas or network ports will be available during a regional incident may fail when many organisations need them simultaneously.
Test the entire recovery process
A plan is not proven until it is tested. Start with tabletop exercises, then test individual components and full application recovery. Measure actual RTO and RPO performance, record manual steps and identify missing contacts, credentials or dependencies. Include scenarios where key staff are unavailable. Test returning to the primary environment, not only failing over. Update the plan after system changes and repeat exercises regularly. Executive ownership is important because disaster recovery involves business priorities, communications and risk acceptance as well as technology.
Frequently asked questions
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